We are working hard to reduce our impacts on the environment. We’re focusing not only on our own direct operational impacts, but also on the wider influence we can have through our lending and investment activities.
Governance and approach
Our Environment and Sustainability Policy outlines our approach to managing both direct and indirect impacts. Our main focus in managing our direct, operational impacts is energy use and climate change mitigation as set out in our Climate Action Programme. We’re also addressing waste management, water use and paper use, and aim to continue to enhance our management programmes in these areas in 2012.
Our environmental management system was certified to ISO 14001 until late 2011, when the three-year accreditation expired. We are currently aligning our approach across the organisation and will seek new certification in 2012 to reflect this. We have a specific Building Sustainability Policy, and have made a commitment that any building investment over £5m will receive an environmental certification.
We’ve strengthened approaches across the whole organisation, focusing on internal target setting and more strategic coordination. We engage key stakeholders such as employees, NGOs and suppliers to proactively manage our impact on the environment.
Climate Action Programme
Our Climate Action Programme was launched in 2010 and covers the period 2011-2015. It focuses on the three areas where we have most influence or potential to mitigate climate change:
- Developing products and services for a low carbon economy – financing, risk management solutions and client solutions to facilitate the flow of capital to low carbon opportunities. For example, see Financing a lower-carbon economy
- Managing climate change risks – collaborating with stakeholders to minimise the risk to our own operations, customers, clients and society at large. For example, see Managing social and environmental risk in lending
- Managing our own carbon footprint – as part of the Climate Action Programme, we have committed to reducing our absolute carbon emissions by 4% by 2013 and offsetting the remainder. We are looking to extend our target post 2013 this year. As part of our wider low carbon investment strategy, we have also set up an African Carbon Fund to supply seed capital to mitigation projects. For example, see Emissions and energy use.
Data and performance
Our data collection systems for energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continued to evolve during 2011. Key improvements included the introduction of new data collection protocols, quarterly reporting on environmental KPIs and significant enhancements to data accuracy, especially across our global retail network. We will begin reporting our recycling and waste data and more complete water data in 2013.
To view data, see Emissions and energy use
In 2011, we achieved our 2013 carbon reduction target of 4% ahead of schedule. We achieved a total carbon emissions decrease of 4.5%, which included a 4.6% reduction in energy use in our buildings. Key contributors to this included a decrease of 9.4% in energy use by our Wealth and Investment Management and Corporate and Investment Banking divisions’ data centres, due to investments in improving IT energy efficiency. Absa also achieved an overall energy reduction of 13%, through a combination of energy efficiency initiatives and improved energy management and data collection.
We will set new environmental performance targets as part of our 2015 Citizenship Plan.
Assurance observation
Barclays has achieved increased completeness of energy consumption data by cross-referencing reporting sites to a global property database. This has helped to identify which parts of the business were reporting actual consumption and where estimations were required. However, the proportion of estimations remains high in certain parts of the business and Barclays should continue its efforts to collect information for this and other environmental parameters.
Data scope and completeness
|
KPI/ |
Scope |
Assumptions |
Changes since 2010 |
|
Electricity/ gas use |
Global operations, including Absa. |
Energy data – including electricity, and where appropriate, gas – is collected from approximately 93% of our portfolio by m2 |
Data scope in a key building – 5 North Colonnade (London) – has increased to include shared areas. We have re-calculated 2009 and 2010 figures to take this into account. |
|
Carbon emissions |
Scope 1: covers direct energy use (on-site diesel generator in Absa, gas) and company car fleet in the UK and Absa (South Africa) |
Scope 1: Diesel data has been estimated for Absa this year, based on 2010 consumption. This is due to a change in supplier. Actual consumption will resume for 2012. Company car data is collected for UK and South Africa |
We are now using the WRI Greenhouse Gas Protocol conversion factors (2011 version) for the majority of our carbon emission calculations, as it provided a better coverage of our operations than previous methodologies. We have re-calculated our emissions for 2009 and 2010 based on these factors, to ensure comparability from year to year. |
|
Water |
We collect water data for the UK and across many sites outside the UK. |
We are unable at the moment to estimate what proportion of our business is covered by the data. |
We have widened water data scope this year to include operations outside the UK. |
